September 13, 2019 — The Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve will receive about $250,000 over two years to study how warming coastal waters are affecting lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, the National Sea Grant Office has announced.

The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most waters around the world.

Since lobsters thrive in cold water, this warming trend has raised concerns about the future of the Gulf’s lobster fishery. Southern New England has already seen dramatic declines in lobster counts and the fishery there is in jeopardy.

“Lobsters prefer cold water and will move to deeper, offshore areas to find it,” said Jason Goldstein, research director at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve. “We plan to discover how the inshore and offshore movements of female lobsters are affected by warming waters, and whether their young can settle and grow in shallow nursery habitats as coastal waters become warmer.”

September 12, 2019 — The day the yellow clams turned black is seared in Ramón Agüero’s memory.

It was the summer of 1994. A few days earlier, he had collected a generous haul, 20 buckets of the thin-shelled, cold-water clams, which burrow a foot deep into the sand along a 13-mile stretch of beach near Barra del Chuy, just south of the Brazilian border. Agüero had been digging up these clams since childhood, a livelihood passed on for generations along these shores.

But on this day, Agüero returned to find a disastrous sight: the beach covered in dead clams.

“Kilometer after kilometer, as far as our eyes could see. All of them dead, rotten, opened up,” remembered Agüero, now 70. “They were all black, and had a fetid odor.”

He wept at the sight.

The clam die-off was an alarming marker of a new climate era, an early sign of this coastline’s transformation. Scientists now suspect the event was linked to a gigantic blob of warm water extending from the Uruguayan coast far into the South Atlantic, a blob that has only gotten warmer in the years since.

September 12, 2019 — A “blob” of warm water in the Pacific Ocean could disrupt the marine ecosystem off the coast of California, similar to an event that occurred five years ago, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The patch, designated the Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2019 and also referred to as a “blob,” is the second-biggest such mass in four decades and, according to experts, is on a similar path to that of one that, from 2014 to 2016, caused toxic algae blooms and killed sea life ranging from sea lions to salmon en masse.

“I am surprised to see something like this develop again so soon after what looked like the end of the marine heatwave in 2016,” Nate Mantua, head of the Landscape Ecology Team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, Calif., told the newspaper.

September 12, 2019 — The following was released by the Lenfest Ocean Program:

The Lenfest Ocean Program will host an interactive webinar on Friday, September 20 from 12:30 pm-2 pm ET during which participants can share their perspectives on shifting marine species. The webinar is open to anyone interested in discussing this critical issue.

This webinar is a precursor to an Ideas Lab workshop that the Lenfest Ocean Program, in collaboration with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Biodiversity Funder’s Group, will host later this fall to discuss the future of U.S. fisheries in the face of climate change, generate research priorities, and kickstart the funding of key research projects. The application period for this workshop closed on August 22.

To facilitate planning around the webinar, which will include breakout discussion groups, please register by 12 pm ET on Thursday, September 19.

As an oceanographer, I study the many ways oceans change—from week-to-week, year-to-year and, of course, over decades and centuries—to better understand the changes that are underway and the far-reaching impacts they may have on marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.

A huge mass of extra warm water extending from Baja California in Mexico all the way to Alaska and the Bering Sea could result in death for many sea lions and salmon, as well as toxic algae blooms that can poison mussels, crabs and other sea life.

When it happened in 2014 it was dubbed “The Blob” and disrupted sea life between Southern California and Alaska. Now it’s back.

“Temperatures are about as warm as have ever been observed in any of these locations. It developed in mid-June and it’s gotten really big really fast,” said Nate Mantua, head of the Landscape Ecology Team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California.

September 11, 2019 — Pacific island countries could lose an estimated USD 60 million (EUR 54.5 million) in revenue annually due to the impacts of climate change on the tuna population within the next 30 years, according to Conservation International (CI).

In a fact sheet produced by CI with the assistance of the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS), modeling indicates increases in ocean temperature due to climate change will cause skipjack and yellowfin tuna to shift to the east.

September 11, 2019 — Almost a year to the date after Hurricane Florence wreaked havoc in North Carolina’s fishing communities, Hurricane Dorian started its march toward the same target.

The week-long trek up the Southeast coastline had North Carolina’s fishermen pulling boats and removing gear from the waters. For most the effort paid off, with the aftermath proving to be little more than a cleanup and of course, precious time lost on the water.

Some were not as fortunate. Ocracoke Island, a barrier island on North Carolina’s Outer Banks near where Dorian made landfall Sept. 6, took the brunt and experienced catastrophic flooding with widespread destruction of property.

September 10, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Ocean acidification (OA) is a shift in the world’s oceans from neutral to more acidic water from the update of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The ocean absorbs about 30% of the carbon in the air, resulting in increasing levels of carbonic acid in the sea.

Researchers in Alaska, the South Pacific, New England, and further afield are studying the effects of increasing OA on their waters. In Alaska, research is focused on fisheries — from the billion-dollar groundfish resource in the Bering Sea to life-saving subsistence food along coastline; in New England, Martha’s Vinyard oyster ponds are being protected locally as OA increases, and in the South Pacific, a recent gathering of environmental ministers announced new alliances on research for OA, including a brand new Pacific Climate Change Centre (PCCC) to address OA among other climate change impacts, research, and innovation in creating resiliancies among Pacific Nations.

Alaska ranks as the fastest-warming U.S. state, and because it is surrounded by cold oceans, it is experiencing the fastest rise in OA.

The Alaska Ocean Acidification Center connects scientists with stakeholders who want to know everything they can about how OA may affect the state’s valuable fisheries resources. Established in 2016, the Center tracks the latest carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (as of March 30, at 412.48 ppm, the highest recorded ever) and conducts experiments that inform what higher OA will do to pollock, cod, and crab species.

Robert Foy, Science and Research Director for NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, says the direct effects of OA may be to reduce growth rates of juvenile fish, decreasing survival. OA can also interfere with sensory signals in the brain causing the fish to not recognize predators or prey. Indirect effects on the food web may reduce abundance of prey for fish, such as pteropods, the main food for juvenile fish. Cumulative effects may be a reduction in the overall productivity of fish resulting in less to catch commercially or gather for subsistence.

The Alaska Marine Advisory Sea Grant program supports the research of University of Alaska Fairbanks assistant professor Amanda Kelley, a top researcher on ocean acidification’s effects in Alaska. Alaska Sea Grant has funded Kelley’s research studying how shellfish react to different levels of OA. Sea Grant recently produced a video of work Kelley is doing in Seward and in Kachemak Bay to better understand OA and how tribal members and citizen scientists are getting involved in monitoring it.

After Alaska, Rhode Island ranks as the fastest-warming state, following by New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, and Massachusetts. The oyster industry in Martha’s Vinyard has been monitoring OA for years and may have an innovative approach to mitigating it.

The Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group launched a shell recycle program, where they collect shells, let them age until they’re clean, and release them back into Great Ponds for restoration. “Adding shells helps buffer the water in small scales,” Emma Green-Beach, lead scientist of the Group said. “It provides hard calcium for baby oysters.”

Oysters are a “keystone species” on Martha’s Vineyard, as their existence provides a habitat for other organisms. “When you have clusters of oysters, they make huge reefs where fish, urchins, crabs, and all sorts of plants and animals can live,” Green-Beach said. “Little fish can hide there. Big fish can hunt there. Oysters create a hard and complex structure on an otherwise muddy, flat bottom.” Oysters also filter water, and adults can filter up to 50 gallons a day, according to Green-Beach.

The work that is being carried out in the Pacific to address this issue was highlighted at a side event during the second day of the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP)’s 29th Meeting of Officials taking place in Apia, Samoa last week.

Among those highlighted was work of the New Zealand-Pacific Partnership on Ocean Acidification (NZPPOA) project in Fiji and Tokelau, Samoa’s joint initiative on OA monitoring with the Republic of Korea, and the recently published “Mainstreaming Ocean Acidification into National Policies” handbook on OA for the Pacific.

The NZPPOA project is a collaborative effort between the University of the South Pacific, the Pacific Community and SPREP, with funding support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of New Zealand and the Government of the Principality of Monaco. It aims to build the resilience of Pacific island communities to OA and was developed in response to needs identified during the Third United Nations Small Islands States Conference in Apia in 2014.

Its focus is on research and monitoring, capacity and awareness building, and practical adaptation actions. The pilot sites for the practical adaptation actions were Fiji, Kiribati, and Tokelau, two of which were present at the side event this afternoon and presented on the progress of the work being done in their countries.

OA monitoring buoys have been set up and deployed successfully in Palau, and will soon be set up in Samoa, and staff of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in Samoa will have the responsibility to operate and maintain these buoy systems.

This story was originally posted on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

September 9, 2019 — The Portland marine science lab that first told the world the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost any other part of the ocean is launching a virtual climate center that will focus on finding solutions to the challenges related to ocean warming.

Under this virtual banner, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute hopes to leverage its science and educational expertise to help fishermen, policymakers, and coastal communities in Maine and around the world deal with the consequences of rising ocean temperatures.

“We’ve spent the last decade identifying warming trends and associated challenges,” said Don Perkins, a Maine native who has been at GMRI’s helm for almost 25 years. “We’ll spend the next decade identifying solutions to some of those challenges and helping coastal communities adapt to a warming future.”